So Big

Having grown up in Chicago I especially loved the the early history of the city. My mother taught in a one-room-school house in Wisconsin like Selina in the story, and Edna describes it vividly. Her writing brought it all to life, even the farm my parents came from in the early 1900's. I'll remember this book for a long time.

The film adaptation of "So Big" with Jane Wyman
Is spectacular.... so I decided to add this book to my Summer Reading list..Mistake number one.
Mistake number two...was not putting it on book shelf. When I realized how awful it was.

Selina sees the world in color and finds beauty in the most mundane; throughout hardships and deaths she plods onward digging and planting and scratching a living out of her 40 acre plot of ground while raising her only son Dirk. She improvises using new methods she studied and becomes prosperous to enable her to send Dirk to the best of schools only to become disappointed by the fact that he can't see the beauty she has tried to instill within him. His choices of becoming one of the "grands" did not impress Selina - instead she was saddened by the fact that he missed the best in life, the little happinesses. His choices of friends and girlfriend led him to prosperity and impressional fame - but was taken by surprise when his mother was adored by everyone regarding her accomplishments and work ethics . In planting her land, raising her crops, her ideas of mulching, planting and raising asparagus made her a sought after supplier in the best of hotels and restaurants and Fame and money never changed her or failed to prevent her from seeing beauty all around - even in a cabbage; but sometimes you can't pass on your view or vision to others. It was at the end that Dirk finally saw what his mother had been trying to teach him, that when he wanted beauty/love most, it would not be there. He had missed the most important things in life mistaken with the illusion and delusions of grandeur.

The book, for me, was hard to put down, I savored every word, hating for it to end. The author used some unfamiliar word choices only adding more depth to the story. You are left with the thought... Don't forget to smell the roses along the way.

Possible spoiler alert.

This is is the first time I've read an Edna Ferber novel, and I can say that I really enjoyed it.
The book's heroine, Selina, is a likeable character, one who has seen life at its toughest, but never grumbles, remains optimistic, and places all her hopes in her son, Dirk.
She raises him, as a widow, on a farm in a Dutch speaking area of Illinois, not far from Chicago.

The son Dirk, is decent enough, but somewhat weak as well, and allows an unhappily married woman (who wants but can't have him) to push him around, and make him conform to being what she thinks a young man of his station should be.
His allowing this to happen is of some disappointment to Selina, but as he's an adult, she doesn't stand in his way.

Does the plot sound somewhat familiar? Perhaps it does, but the book doesn't seem corny, it's an effective read.

The ending is somewhat abrupt, making the book, to some readers, seem somewhat unfinished.
But it's still a good ending, the author lets readers decide for themselves what becomes of Dirk, whether he continues to live a life in which he is successful but not entirely happy, or does he become true to himself, and go on to live/follow his dreams?
I suspect it would be the former, but it's left to each reader of the book to speculate.

What does it mean to be a successful person? What is the price of success? Can we help our children too much on their way to success? All of these topics and more are found in Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, So Big. So Big chronicles the life of Selina Peake and her son, “So Big” Dirk DeJong. The daughter of a gambler, Selina finds herself alone at her father’s sudden death with no way to support herself. She decides to become a teacher in the outskirts of Chicago within a Dutch community of vegetable farmers. She tries to find the beauty in her situation and soon finds herself in love. Will Selina be able to find her way in her new setting? How will her choices effect the life of her son?

I picked So Big for my January book club pick for the FLICKS (Rogue) Book and Movie Club. I have wanted to read So Big for quite some time after I learned that author Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo Michigan (where I was born) and grew up in Appleton Wisconsin (not far from where I live now). She wrote many best sellers that were made into movie favorites such as Showboat, Cimarron, and Giant. When I discovered she wrote the Pulitzer Prize winner novel of 1925, I was stunned. Why had I not heard of this author who was writing in the Jazz age at the same time as F. Scott Fitzgerald?

I still cannot answer that question after reading So Big. I thought it was an excellent novel that while it started in the past, it lead up to the Jazz age and was a perfect picture of what was going on in the time. It had a lot of deep questions to think about. Does being a bonds tradesman and making lots of money make you a successful person? Or does enjoying life and trying to make a good living, but focusing on the beautiful? Also, what happens to the children of the successful tycoons of the Gilded Age who didn’t have to strive for their success as their forbearers did? I found that the messages that were in this book were as relevant today as they were back in the 1920’s. It provided great discussion at our book club, although sadly only one other member read it besides myself. Why is this book and Edna Ferber not part of the literary canon? I feel that successful female authors are often left out in the past as well as today. In her biography in the back of this edition it said in her New York Times obituary that “She was among the best-read novelist in the nation, and critics of the 1920s and ’30’s did not hesitate to call her the greatest American woman novelist of her day.”

So Big reminded me a bit of The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington which I read in a different book club in Milwaukee over ten years ago. Both dealt with the American dream and how families deal with it through the generations, although I thought So Big did a better job.

I enjoyed the characters in this novel, but in particular Selina. I also love how she mentored young Roelf Pool and allowed him to think beyond his hardscrabble existence as a farmer’s son. I also loved that she always thought of the positive and how things could be improved. She was dealt a bad hand at life more than once, but she was able to use her own ingenuity to rise above it all. It was a good feminist story.

The story skipped around some and foreshadowed events, but I enjoyed the style of writing and her great descriptions. I also loved that Sobig gets his nickname from the question you ask, “How Big is Baby,” “So Big!” It was interesting that one book club member had never heard of this!

As an instructor I was intrigued when Sobig is in college and there are students that are “classified” or traditional students and “unclassified” or returning adults. The unclassified have saved their entire adult life to finally go to college and achieve their dreams, but they are shunned by both the college and traditional students who have parents to pay for their college. I thought it was interesting that you could raise some hogs to pay for college back in this day. If only it were true now!

I loved the setting and seeing Chicago change through time. I particular loved learning about the vegetable farmer industry and how it grew up to supply the needs of the city and what hard work it was getting it to the city to sell.

Some of my favorite quotes:

“But he sulked and glowered portentously and refused to answer, though her tone, when she called him So Big, would have melted the heard of any but that natural savage, a boy of ten.” As a mother of a ten year old- this gave me a chuckle!

“Selina was to learn that the farm woman, in articulate through lack of companionship, becomes a torrent of talk when opportunity presents itself.”

Aug Hempel – “I’m out in the yards every day, in and out of the cattle pens, talking to the drovers and the herders, mixing in with the buyers. I can tell the weight of a hog and what he’s worth just by the look at him, and a steer, too. My son-in-law Michael Arnold sits up in the office all day in our plant, dictating letters. His clothes they never stink of the pens like mine do . . . Now I ain’t saying anything against him, Julie. But I bet my grandson Eugene, if he comes into the business at all when he grows up won’t go within smelling distance of the yards. His office I bet will be in a new office building on, say Madison Street, with a view of the lake. Life! You’ll be hoggin’ it all yourself and not know it.” This was one of my favorite quotes in the book. Aug Hempel is the father of Selina’s best friend Julie. He was a butcher and then later became a meat packing baron. He was disturbed that through his hard work, the next generations grow more distant from the actual work that brought them their success and maybe of enjoying life to its fullest.

Dirk – “I like it well enough, only – well, you see we leave the university architectural course thinking we’re all going to be Stanford Whites or Cass Gilberts, tossing of a Woolworth building and making yourself famous overnight. I’ve spent all yesterday and today planning how to work space of toilets on every floor of the new office building, six stories high and shaped like a dry goods box, that’s going up on the corner of Milwaukee Avenue and Ashland, west.” – I think this is the ban of every beginning architect.

“He might have lived a thousand miles away for all he knew of the rest of Chicago – the might, roaring, swelter, pushing, screaming, and magnificent hideous steel giant that was Chicago.”

“Neat little pamphlets are written for women on the subjects of saving, investments. ‘You are not dealing with a soulless corporation,’ said these brochures.”

Overall, So Big by Edna Ferber is a magnificent American novel and should be a must read for everyone.

So Big is a novel about the adventure called life. It has serious messages about family, motherhood, hardship, and most importantly, finding beauty. I am very glad to have met Selina, who lived in several homes in several cities during her childhood, than moved to a Dutch farming community. Alhough she faces challenges previously unknown to her, she tries to keep her dignity and view of life amidst physical, financial, and mental hardships.

But this story is not only about her. I agree with a previous reviewer who said that this book was about contrast. We meet smart and dumm, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, visionary and “near-sighted”, and everything in between. All the characters - even the ones who we meet for a short time - are so well described, that we almost feel like knowing them. And maybe, we do. I could relate some of them to people I know, and sometimes, to myself. Ms Ferber knows the nature of people, and shows it in a wonderful way.

This was my first book by Edna Ferber, and I love her work! This one is definitely a must read.

In So Big Edna Ferber provides us with a fascinating insight into life in Chicago and the nearby prairies from the gay nineties through the roaring twenties. Ms Ferber brought her characters to life in such a way as to make them easily identifiable to twenty-first century readers. She wrote in the same times and of the same times as Willa Cather (the other female Pulitzer winning novelist from the prairies). Ferber's skills at characterization, however, make the people of her novels appear real enough to transcend the elapsed century.

So Big is the story of a widow raising a young son on a small Illinois truck farm and the decisions they make and how their disparate choices impact the quality of their lives. Ms Ferber craftily sets characters into the tableaus of turn-of-the-century Chicago and the outlying Dutch farming community. She is so successful in painting her scenes that the authenticity of them is never in doubt. The reader (me) is thrilled to have such a detailed view of city and country life of these times.

Edna Ferber was a master of middlebrow fiction, those novels read by bourgeois readers looking for entertainment and melodrama and a semblance of erudition without the actual pain of thought. So Big, Cimarron, Showboat, and Giant by their titles indicate the sweep of the family sagas she liked to write. She was a careful wordsmith, and So Big received the Pulitzer Price in 1925. Her prose is as fluent as any novel in the twentieth century, though far less learned than masters like Henry James, William Faulker, or Robert Penn Warren. But all comparisons end there. Her work is utterly devoid of ideas, themes, and character development equal to the scope of her writing. So Big, like all of Ferber’s novels, is all story, and nothing more. But what sets Ferber apart from other middlebrow novelists is her research; her novels are rich with authentic details and masterfully evoke the color of the era. Any sex or violence in the story is narrated and quite muted, consistent with the norms for her time.

In that regard, her novels are ideal vehicles for Hollywood epics (Giant) and serious musicals (Showboat). They are on a par with Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar or Irwin Shaw’s Rich Man, Poor Man or John O’Hara’s On the Terrace. All of them wrote books to be read while waiting for your flight to be announced. They are light-weight fiction. The Pultizer Prize is not an indicia of literary quality, by the way. The Good Earth (Pearl Buck), Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell), In This Our Life (Ellen Glasgow), and Alice Adams (Booth Tarkington) were all prize winners in the years immediately after So Big. They are all equally middlebrow. So Big is the kind of writing the mass market rewards, and for what it is, it is competently conceived and written.

Although you can see glimmers of some of Ferber's later works, such as Show Boat (as well as Willa Cather's O, Pioneers!), this early novel is undoubtedly one of her best and most whole. Strong characters, strong themes, and an adamance against sentimental cliche raise it into a thought-provoking, ultimately triumphant story of pain, loss, struggle, and determination. Strangely enough, I vividly remember reading an excerpt (the basket auction scene) in high school literature. I always wanted to find the book it came from and read it, and now, quite by accident, I have.

I read So Big literally decades ago, and the story has stuck with me through all that time.
Selina DeJong's positive and hard working attitude is inspirational. Ferber does her justice in the end, when Selina achieves "gravitas," the state of being satisfied with her life and wise in old age.
Typically, her son doesn't appreciate what his mother has given him until his is older and can see her through his girlfriend's eyes. Suddenly she becomes clear to him as a heroine.
This story even inspired me to each vegetables more! I can only hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.

Marvellous and can see why Ferber got the Pulitrzer. It is a masterpiece of writing and it gives such a clear historic picture of the Chicago area in the late 1800's and early 1900's. I am enjoying it so much and will hate to close my kindle when I read her last word.

This novel by Edna Ferber deserves much more fame than it has today. With her unsparing, naturalistic style and her accounts of early 20th-century American life, Ferber can be compared appropriately to Theodore Dreiser, whose literary reputation shines brighter than hers today. It is time for a Ferber revival. She is that rare author who is both satirical about her subject matter and loving at the same time.

Finally, I pulled the little paperbook with yellow pages off the shelf and read it. My mother gave it to me decades ago. Enjoying it has been like having her back with me for a moment, saying, "See? I knew you would love it!" I did, Mom. And you were Selina DeJong, loving life, finding and creating beauty even when life was hard, inspiring your children to laugh, love, and live while keeping an eye out for people who may need a helping hand. And in the end, you were loved and admired, as was Selina, not for what you owned but for what you gave away - especially yourself.
This book is more than a tribute to my mother's good taste; it is a delight to the soul. I rarely read novels, despising poor use of language or contrived dialogue. There is none of either in this work. Please enjoy it and pass it on to your daughter. My mom will probably smile when you do.

I don't think Edna Ferber gets nearly the attention she deserves these days. In fact, I'd say she's almost forgotten--which is a terrible shame! This book is powerfully vivid like any good work of fiction can be. It really draws you in so much that you grieve losing the characters at the end. And as someone who grow up in south suburb Chicago about a hundred years after the book's actions--it's interesting to know the Dutch heritage of the farmland that was so soon gobbled up and subdivided. I hadn't thought about it at the time, but my hometown has a Dutch name, and I grew up hearing Dutch surnames and not even realizing it. So few works of literature are set in my hometown area, so perhaps to me the book has an even more special connection. But you don't need it to enjoy it.
I first read it twenty years ago in grade six. Still today sometimes I think "cabbages iz beautiful" and laugh.

What a deceptive little book this started out to be. I kept wondering why Ms. Ferber got a Pulitzer for this. I was definitely enjoying reading about Selina, So Big's mom, but it was not until the very end of the book that I realized what a powerful message it was conveying. So Big sold out, Selina did not. Guess who was the more successful?

Edna Ferber's book is touching and timeless. The themes of money, working hard, family, and real "living" are as appropriate today as when the book was written. You can't help but be taken in by the inspirational story of Selina Peake...don't miss it.

So Big is a novel about the adventure called life. It has serious messages about family, motherhood, hardship, and most importantly, finding beauty. I am very glad to have met Selina, who lived in several homes in several cities during her childhood, than moved to a Dutch farming community. Alhough she faces challenges previously unknown to her, she tries to keep her dignity and view of life amidst physical, financial, and mental hardships.

But this story is not only about her. I agree with a previous reviewer who said that this book was about contrast. We meet smart and dumm, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, visionary and “near-sighted”, and everything in between. All the characters - even the ones who we meet for a short time - are so well described, that we almost feel like knowing them. And maybe, we do. I could relate some of them to people I know, and sometimes, to myself. Ms Ferber knows the nature of people, and shows it in a wonderful way.

This was my first book by Edna Ferber, and I love her work! This one is definitely a must read.